So at first, you have to consider our history.
We have 5 Apps out since August 2012, where we started with Super Zombie Tennis. Since then (1,5 Years ) i'm trying to build a community around Tinytouchtales. I talk a lot to other devs and fans. We are active in multiple forums and try to share as much information as we can, to get people notice us. I visit local meetups (Berlin) or game events like the GDC Europe to get the word out. I do Gamjams like Ludum Dare, Global Game jam or the Stencyl Jam to get more people see our work.
All of this i have done while working 8-9h a day in my fulltime job with only evenings and weekends to work on Tinytouchtales stuff. This is the amount of passion i have put into my dream. Which means i work a 14-16h day, almost every day since mid August 2012. I don't want to brag about it, but that what it takes. I enjoyed it but this is one point why i'm going to work full time on Tinytouchtales next year with quitting my fulltime Job next Week. To basically have a live besides Tinytouchtales again, because at times there are more important things in live than making games, believe it or not
.
When we released our Kids book Katrins colorful Moonstory we made a first contact to Apple. Which means by contacts from another Dev we know, we could directly mail/pitch our App to the Head of App Store for the german speaking stores. I do believe that our Apps have a certain amount of quality in gameplay and graphical representation and that's what Apple likes. Additionally we had a lot of luck a) to get the contact at all (direct result from networking with other devs about 1 year) and b) our Apple contact is kind of a fan of us as a team. I already wrote it somewhere but once we pitched Katrins to him it got featured as #1 iPad App in all German speaking stores. After that we pitched him Matchagon, which was released about 6 Month at this point. A week later we got a Matchagon featuring in some smaller categories, which resulted in about 40.000dls from which 800 people a day play Matchagon until today.
After Matchagon was recognized in the UK (from a featuring), a person from the iAds team in the UK called (via phone, so direct 1 to 1 communication) us and encouraged us to integrate iAds into Matchagon because they believe it has potential and we are loosing money on the game.
I was worried about cluttering the game with ads but i did it because, this is how you can ask for favors. As we were about to release Zuki's Quest i pitched it again to the German App Store guys and also, even though not related to App Store stuff, to this other contact at Apple and told him that i integrated iAds in the last Matchagon update. So this time we had two chances to get a featuring. Two weeks later Zuki's Quest was massively featured in 123 countries with a #10 featuring in the US Store which is still the most important one.
I don't know anything about the featuring process that Apple has and i can only tell you what we did, but it works out for us so far. With every Game you release you have to grow you community and try to engage them in your games. The more people know the better.
Another thing that happened now is because of the featuring and good feedback from iOS Players. The guys from the 100% Indie Platform, the guys from the Gamestick and just today a guy from Google contacted us, because they are interested in our Games. Those things can snowball but you have to reach a critical point, which is immensely hard and even though those people are "interested" does not make them "buy" your product. It took us 1,5 years and remember we have never made any significant money from our Apps yet.
You have to watch Zach Gage's talk on surviving in the App Store, where he explains that the normal duration before you earn any money without having a hit is 3-8 Years.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tICD7YqssX8
I hope that explains some things. You will need to work very hard and be lucky several times.
